NOTE: Courses are
subject to change depending on enrollment and faculty teaching assignments.
Please check BANWEB for more current information on the availability
of all courses.

English 1101 and
1102 are prerequisites for all courses from ENGL 2110 through 4386.

A W
designation after a section number of a 3000- or 4000-level course signifies
that the course is a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) course. WAC
accepts as a guiding principle the idea that writing is a valuable tool
for learning a communication. Therefore, the components of a course
so designated are designed to help you learn the material and communicate
what you have learned. Students are required to take two W
courses for the undergraduate degree.

Skip down the page
to view the following courses offered during the Fall 2005 term:

Description:
Effective communicators are more productive, have enhanced career opportunities,
enjoy more fulfilling relationships, earn more respect, and have more
fun! The good news is that you already have the tools you need to
become a great communicator; it’s just a matter of learning how to use
them consciously and masterfully…in other words, learning how to “self-stage.”

In
Self-Staging: Oral Communication in Everyday Life, we will study and
practice practical communication skills—creativity, quick thinking,
risk taking, lateral thinking, active listening, subtext mastery, self-awareness—and
apply them to virtually every interaction you encounter outside the
classroom: One-on-One Conversations, Public Presentation, Debate and
Argumentation, Conflict Resolution and Confrontation Skills, Stress
Management, Team Building, and Impression Management. By the end of
the semester, students will have had first-hand experience in all of
these areas, and, more importantly, will know exactly how to continue
honing and perfecting those skills long after.

Prerequisites:
ENGL 1101 and 1102. Required for English majors. May count for credit
in Core Area C.

Description:
Why do bad things happen to good people? How do we account for—or
even define—good and evil? Is ours, in fact, the best of all
possible worlds…and what narratives do we create when we find that it
isn’t? In World Literature: Reading the Dark Side,
we’ll explore these unrelenting questions, and examine the many ways
in which mankind has perceived, explained, and coped with adversity
since we were first able to express our deepest hopes and fears in written
form.

Texts:
TheEpic of Gilgamesh; Goethe, Faust; Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound; Voltaire,
Candide; Dante, The Inferno; Soyinko, Death and the King’s
Horseman; Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning. Supplementary
course pack will include excerpts from The Egyptian
Book of the Dead, The Mahabarata and The Bhagavad Gita, the
Tao Te Ching, Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Plato’s
Apology and Phaedo, The Koran, The Bible, John Milton’s
Paradise Lost, Lu Xun, Oswalde de Andrade, and Mark Twain’s Letters
from the Earth.

Description:
This course investigates the origins and development of the human capacity
to create narratives epic in their scope: narratives that establish
the myths, values, character, and history of a tribe, nation, or culture.
Rather than assigning a host of excerpts from the diverse literatures
of the entire world that were ever written or spoken, I have chosen
six representative texts for us to analyze and explore in great detail.
Each of these texts focuses on a traveler seeking heroic adventures
in new worlds, cultural encounters with new beings, and ultimately someplace
to settle down and call “home.” And, more importantly, each of our texts
chart the imagined origins and history of a new culture, nation, or
even empire, from Greek and Roman, to Italian and British, to African
and Native American.

Texts:
The Odyssey (Homer), The Aeneid (Virgil), The Inferno
(Dante), The Tempest (Shakespeare), A Grain of Wheat (Ngugi),
Ceremony (Silko).

Requirements:
Students must write two 1500-word papers, maintain a passing quiz average,
and take a final exam in order to pass the class.

For
Honors students only. Required for English majors. May count for credit
in Core Area C.

Description:
The purpose of this course is to consume the world. Well, maybe that
is a slight exaggeration. Let’s say the purpose is to survey literary
and cultural documents from around the world starting with the earliest
extant materials, usually the Sumerian epic poem Gilgamesh, and
working our way by leaps and bounds up to the modern period, usually
a contemporary poet such as Seamus Heaney or perhaps a film. Although
we shall try our best to view this literature in a historical and political
context, we will be hard pressed to be very detailed due to the astonishing
breadth of this survey. Given the fact that we will be moving quickly
through a lot of cultures, we shall hold to two constants: one, mythology
as a grammar for comparative analysis; two, literacy as the fundamental
skill of skills that we shall practice. The myths that we shall
survey are typically myths of various heroes (gods, goddesses, warriors,
tricksters, and wisdom figures), employed in a variety of archetypal
plots (creation, protection, deliverance, questing and testing). The
literacy tasks will be an assortment of the following: oral responses
in class, oral presentation as a group, short answer writing on exams,
and short essays written out of class.

Texts:
Maynard Mack, ed., The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Norton,
1997 (ISBN: 0393971430). Robert Segal,
A Very Short Introduction to Myth Oxford University Press, 2004
(ISBN: 0192803476).

Requirements:
Active engagement in class discussion, two short essays, oral presentation,
midterm, and final exam.

Description:
Our sweeping survey of British literature will take us from the medieval
poem Beowulf to Doris Lessing’s novel The Grass Is Singing.
As we move swiftly through the centuries, touching on important
works of literature from all the major periods, we will look for connections,
patterns, and trends that enable us to begin to define a national literature,
paying attention to the historical and political contexts out of which
these texts arose. Throughout the history of British literature we will
trace a preoccupation with the social order: how it is established and
maintained, what threats it faces, and to what extent the existing order
may be challenged. We will pay attention to how the social order is
represented in these works, and consider its relationship to the literary
works that not only reflect it but arguably both reinforce and undermine
it.

Description:
You could call this course the
British Buffet, in whichyou’ll
sample literary delicacies created by major British authors from the
middle ages to the present. All literary genres will be presented for
your tasting pleasure: poetry (Blake, Tennyson, Heaney), drama (Shakespeare,
Beckett), essay (Swift, Wollstonecraft, Darwin) and short and long fiction
(Chaucer, Dickens, Conrad, Woolf). To add spice to the literature, we’ll
also consider the major cultural trends (political, religious, artistic)
that inform and influence the texts.

ENGL 2120-03:
British Literature, Prof. Teresa JonesTR 12:30-1:45
PM, Humanities 227
Required for English majors. May count for credit
in Core Area C.

Description:
This course introduces students to representative works of British literature
from the Anglo-Saxon age to the twentieth century. In addition to exploring
questions of genre, literary periods, and historical context, we will
explorestories of adventure
that grapple with the fluidity of individual and social identify as
shaped by the transformative power of desire, the desire to own, to
understand, to create, to imagine, to conquer, and to contain.We will explore a national consciousness over time as it finds
expression in individual moments of striving and being.

For
Honors students only. Required for English majors. May count for credit
in Core Area C.

Description:
Beginning with Beowulf and ending in the latter twentieth-century, we
will survey the major authors and periods of British literature, paying
attention to how the ideas of each period inform the language, style,
and leading genres of the times as well as how each period builds upon
and revises important literary and cultural ideas of the previous generation
in the course of developing a national literature.

Texts:
Graham Greene, The Quiet American; J.M. Synge, Playboy
of the Western World; Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities;
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Norton Critical Edition); M.H.
Abrams, et.al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Major
Authors, w/ media companion.

Requirements:
Reading responses and journal, two papers, short oral presentation,
midterm and final exams.

For Honors students only. Required for English majors. May
count for credit in Core Area C.

Description: From the mead halls of Beowulf to the various
wastelands of modernity, this course will explore the evolution of the
British literary tradition, with particular attention to the prominence
of specific literary forms and genres within particular historical periods.
Drawing together the various threads of our conversation will be the
question of “Britishness”

itself: how does a national literary tradition establish
a sense of national character, and how do the various spaces of our
textual exploration—from Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre to Brontë’s lonely
manor houses to Joyce’s “dear, dirty Dublin”—raise questions about what
it means to be included in that tradition?

Texts: Norton Anthology of British Literature: The Major
Authors; William Shakespeare, Othello; Tom Stoppard, Arcadia.

For Honors students only. Required for English majors.
May count for credit in Core Area C.

Description:
This course introduces students to representative works of British literature
from the Anglo-Saxon age to the twentieth century. In addition to exploring
questions of genre, literary periodization, and historical context,
we will be concerned with the stories literature has told, over time,
about the “self”—whether that involves the person writing the text,
the people imagined in the text, or the larger culture surrounding the
text. We will also examine ways in which texts mediate the relationship
between “self” and “culture” in both reactionary and revolutionary ways.

Text: The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The
Majors Authors, 7th edition, packaged with CD-ROM.

For
Honors students only. Required for English majors. May count for credit
in Core Area C.

Description:
"I Must Create a System or be Enslav'd by Another Man's,"
warns Romantic poet/painter William Blake. In this study of British
literature, we will read selected texts, medieval to contemporary, with
an emphasis on the dynamic between individuals and communities (familial,
social, cultural, political), how individuals are shaped by/resist these
forces, and how literature and critical practices respond to these changing
dynamics. We will analyze diverse texts of fiction, drama, poetry, film,
and music which nevertheless offer recurrent themes; for example, conflicts
between spiritual and material culture from medieval mystic Julian of
Norwich to U2 and the compelling power of what Heaney will call "the
tribe" in Irish literature.

Description:
In this course we will examine the movement of the American frontier
and its effects on national identity. How do we define “frontier”? Can
we define it? Or is the notion of a frontier in constant flux? What
does the idea of a Manifest Destiny tell us about our insatiable desire
for westward expansion, for empty spaces? And were they actually empty?
To answer these questions and others, we will consult a variety of American
texts—from the cultured “European” Northeast to the often romanticized
“wild” West—to view how different regions formed identity in relation
to both national geography and mental borders. Furthermore we will pay
specific attention to Western literature that depicts the challenge
of building a new West in the shadow of its mythic past. Finally, our
frontier exploration will address how barriers, both physical and psychological,
shaped cultural and racial relations, and how the frontier became a
dividing line between society and wilderness.

Texts:
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Version; Hawthorne,
The Scarlet Letter; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Description:
On defining the creation of identity, American essayist, novelist, and
playwright James Arthur Baldwin comments, “An identity would seem to
be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.”
Baldwin’s statement encompasses far-ranging ideas and introduces questions
that have historically characterized American literature: How have Americans
characterized their own identities at different points in time, and
how have historical events, cultural phenomena, social environments,
and personal experiences become meshed with and changed these identities?
To what extent does the American landscape, either as a physical or
symbolic space, attribute to this definition? Is the definition “American”
even a valid identity? As we closely examine these questions by examining
the various literary genres that span almost four centuries, we will
focus on how language and writing has been used to construct and alter
the meaning of “American identity.” In addition, we will also delve
into the formation of identity from the perspectives of race, gender,
and social class and examine how each has been used for this purpose.

For
Honors students only. Required for English majors. May count for credit
in Core Area C.

Description:
In this class we will devote much of our time to reading, discussing,
and writing about such classic texts in American literature as Franklin’s
Autobiography, Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Hawthorne's
The Scarlet Letter, Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, Thoreau’s Walden, Whitman’s and Dickinson’s poems,
Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby, Eliot's The Waste Land, and more. Reading the texts,
in whole or in part, we will focus on the way in which they, through
their forms, themes, and language, echo and even parody each other as
they record a cultural/literary debate on the issue of American identity
with its related questions of what constitutes an American self, society,
and attitudes toward nature. We will use the examples to work toward
a definition of the qualities beyond “written in America” that make
a work of literature “American.” Additional readings from the anthology
will supplement the primary ones.

Texts:The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Sixth Edition,
ed. Nina Baym, et. al. The Last of the Mohicans, The Great Gatsby,
The Scarlet Letter.

Requirements:
Rigorous preparation for and active participation in class meetings;
several short writing assignments; midterm essay, research paper (for
class presentation); and a comprehensive final exam.

For
Honors students only. Required for English majors. May count for credit
in Core Area C.

Description:
This course will develop a range of enduring themes that have characterized
American literature: the encounter with and appropriation of nature;
the crafting of an identity that attempts to reconcile the desires of
the individual with the needs of society; the individual’s ability to
chart his own path to success; the “problem” of the socio-cultural “other”;
and the tension between the public and private spheres. In exploring
these themes, we will read a variety of canonical and non-canonical
texts to examine the authorial strategies that developed over time which
make these works aesthetically as well as historically pertinent.

Texts:
Franklin, The Autobiography; Foster, The Coquette; Douglass,
Narrative of the Life; Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter;
Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Chopin, The Awakening;
Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs; Johnson, Autobiography
of an Ex-Colored Man; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Hurston,
Their Eyes Were Watching God; Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49;
Smith, Fair and Tender Ladies; Morrison, Jazz.

Requirements:
Informed and regular class participation, one short oral report, two
short response papers (3 pages each), one longer paper (5-6 pages),
a “conference” presentation of that longer paper to the seminar; a cumulative
final exam.

Description:
This survey course introduces the student to the literature that writers
of African American heritage created from its beginning in Colonial
America to 1960. The course will examine a number of writers, issues,
genres, styles, and themes; furthermore, it will analyze the historic,
socio--political and cultural forces which helped to shape the African
American experience. The course will also emphasize interlocking race,
gender, and class perspectives, whenever applicable, for analyzing literary
works.

Description:
Why study literature by women? Although the
literary canon has evolved significantly over the past thirty years,
there remains much yet to be uncovered in the female voice. How, then,
do we set about exploring this terrain? As Ellen Moers notes, “By some
accidental or willed critical narrowness, we have routinely denied ourselves
additional critical access to [major female writers] through the fact
of their sex – a fact surely as important as their social class or era
or nationality, a fact of which women writers have been and still are
conscious. How, as human beings, could they not be?”

We will, then, approach the literature in this course through the
lens of the female experience itself. Beginning with Virginia Woolf,
we will first examine those writers whose work centers upon not only
finding their distinctly female voices, but expressing them as well.
We will move then to an examination of the treatment of the female body
and female sexuality: How do women writers represent their own bodies
and sexuality? How does the biological fact of their female bodies
influence their writing?

Finally, we will examine what Joseph Boone refers to as the “countertraditional
voices” in literature by women – those texts whose premise runs decidedly
counter to the traditional structure of narrative, which deems marriage
the ultimate (and often, the only) end for the female protagonist.
Through a discussion of works spanning from the seventeenth century
(Atell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies) to contemporary culture
(Bushnell’s Sex and the City), we will consider how these women
writers raise their voices against marriage, whether through uncovering
the misogynist principles inherent in the traditional structure of marriage,
or through simply advocating alternative choices which prove ultimately
more satisfying.

Our class will culminate in an examination of two seminal works:
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.
We will discuss each text in light of the writer’s revolutionary/revisionist
treatment of the issues we’ve deconstructed this semester: the female
voice, sexuality, and marriage.

ENGL2300-01:
Practical Criticism: Research and Methodology, Prof. Nina LeacockMWF 12:00-12:50,
HUM 205
Required for the major in English as a prerequisite to upper-division
study. Requires permission of the department chair. Not offered during
summer session.

Description:
This challenging course will investigate critical approaches to literature
associated with various contemporary or recent "schools of thought"
(Marxism, New Historicism, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, post-colonial
studies, New Criticism, deconstruction, etc.). While we will read some
short excerpts from seminal texts associated with these schools (Marx,
de Beauvoir, Derrida, etc.), more time will be devoted to studying approaches
as they are practiced in recent criticism. Our work in the first part
of the semester will aim at helping each student assemble an individual
"toolbox" of approaches he or she finds sympathetic and illuminating.
In the second part of the semester, students will try out their "tools"
in individual research projects. Our shared texts will include E.T.A.
Hoffmann's short story "The Sandman," Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
(1818 version), and a film (probably Ridley Scott's Blade Runner).

Requirements:
Class participation, reading quizzes and exams, three short papers,
oral presentation, a research project (including proposal, required
drafts, editing workshops, a formal annotated bibliography, and a final
documented research paper).

Required
for the major in English as a prerequisite to upper-division study.
Requires permission of the department chair. Not offered during summer
session.

Description:
As a prerequisite for upper-division English studies, this course provides
an introduction to various methods of critical analysis. Students will
be encouraged to develop and articulate interpretations from a variety
of theoretical approaches and, hopefully, in the process of articulation,
come to recognize how these perspectives broaden our understanding of
diverse texts. While theoretical approaches such as reader-response
or psychoanalytic criticism will provide the underlying methods of analysis,
the central task of the course is the act of applying them to literary
(and a few filmic) texts. Beginning with an introduction to the different
approaches to critical analysis as applied to one literary text (Henry
James’s The Turn of the Screw), we will transfer the skills learned
in that introduction to a series of other texts (short stories, poems,
and films) before concluding with the final research project.

ENGL
3200-01: Creative Writing, Prof. Kelly Whiddon
MWF 12:00PM-12:50PM, TLC 1204
No more than two (2) 3000-level courses may be counted toward the major
in English.

Description:
Introduction to Writing Fiction and Poetry. In this course, students
will gain writing instruction from class sessions and from instructional
texts and handouts, will critique contemporary fiction and poetry by
acclaimed writers, and will use what they have learned in class and
what they have learned from their readings to create their own poems
and short stories.

On
a day to day level, students’ tasks will consist of reading, writing,
and workshopping (discussing each others’ work in the classroom for
the purpose of improvement). Students will learn to identify literary
elements in the work of established writers and the work of their classmates.
Though tastes in fiction and poetry are arbitrary, in this class, there
will be a certain standard for students to follow. The goal will be
to create fiction and poetry with the same qualities and strengths as
the assigned readings—the type of writing appropriate for mainstream
literary magazines or for well-respected commercial magazines such as
The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly. To be clear,
students will not be expected to write as well as authors who regularly
appear in these magazines, but they will be expected to use these as
examples of “good” writing—as goals to work toward, and so, genre fiction
(mystery, romance, thriller, childrens’, young adult, science fiction,
etc.) or greeting card verse will not be represented or permitted.

Texts:
Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft by Janet Burroway; Like Life
by Lorrie Moore; The Best American Short Stories 2004, Editor: Lorrie
Moore, Series Editor: Katrina Kenison; Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser;
Jack and Other Poems by Maxine Kumin.

Requirements:
Creative work in poetry and fiction, journal entries, reading responses,
critiques, formal reviews, at least one magazine submission, and a portfolio.

No
more than two 3000-level courses may be counted toward the major in
English. May be taken for 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description:
This course provides an introduction to poetry and fiction writing,
with attention to craft and revision. Using contemporary fiction and
poetry anthologies, students will gain some basic familiarity with poets
and short-story writers currently practicing their art. This should
serve as an inspiration and springboard for their own writing, as good
writers must also be good readers. The course will cover the building
blocks of fiction and poetry: concrete language, dramatic situation,
voice, meter, imagery, characterization, conflict, showing vs. telling,
etc. Students will be writing and revising their own work weekly and
should expect to produce a portfolio of work for review at the end of
the semester.

Requirements:
Each student will write 5-6 poems and revise them for the poetry section.
For the fiction section, students will do a number of short exercises
and write and revise one longer story (10-12 pages). There will also
be a short paper and presentation on one of the poets in the Word
ofMouth anthology. All students are required to be active
participants in workshops.

No
more than two 3000-level courses may be counted toward the major in
English. May be taken for 3 hours of WAC requirement.Description:
This creative writing course will focus on the explorative act of writing
to find a subject to write about. Along the way, we will learn how to
make language and, by extension, the world strange again. In Craig Raine’s
famous coinage, we will “defamiliarize” things. Though this is an introductory
level course, expect to read an astonishing amount of poetry, fiction,
essays, and criticism. Count on engaging in critical discussions regarding
aesthetic principles and offering up your own writing for the betterment
of the class. Ultimately the aim of the course is to enable you to access
your imagination through writing, to judge critically works of literature
from the vantage point of the artist, and to come to terms with both
the beautiful and the sublime.

Requirements:
daily readings and exercises, memorization of twenty lines of poetry,
participation, written contributions to the workshop, a final portfolio
of polished writing including a critical preface.

ENGL
3400-01: Advanced Composition, Prof. Kelly WhiddonCreative Nonfiction
MW 5:30-6:45, Pafford 307No more than two (2) 3000-level courses may be counted toward
the major in English. May be taken for certification in Secondary English
Education.

Description:
“Creative nonfiction is no oxymoron. Shorthand for an exciting genre
that encompasses the hard-hitting honesty of journalism and the dramatic
techniques that make fiction so compelling, creative nonfiction is just
that: gripping stories that just happen to be true.” –These are lines
from a literary magazine aptly title Creative Nonfiction. This
description accurately conveys what creative nonfiction is because it
goes beyond the accustomed idea of simply “essay writing.” It uses
the words “hard-hitting,” “dramatic,” “compelling,” and “gripping.”
The writing you will read and do in this class will not be of the elementary
and stale “What I did on my summer vacation” variety. It will be you
taking those moments from your life when you have said, “It was like
something out of a book or a television show,” and actually turning
those moments into written stories or taking those moments that may
have seemed at the time to have little import and writing them so that
you reveal the beauty or gravity or eccentricity in small things. You
will be telling nothing but the truth, but learning to tell that truth
in a way that makes your experiences particularly intriguing.

In
this course, students will gain instruction in writing from class sessions
and from instructional texts and handouts, will critique contemporary
creative nonfiction by acclaimed writers, and will use what they have
learned in class and what they have learned from their readings to create
their own creative nonfiction.

Texts: Writing
Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated
Writing Programs, Editors: Philip Gerard and Carolyn Forche; In Fact:
The Best of Creative Nonfiction, Editors: Lee Gutkind and Annie Dillard;
The Best American Essays 2004, Editors: Louis Menand and Robert Atwan.

Requirements: Creative
nonfiction, journal entries, reading responses, critiques, at least
one submission to a magazine, and a portfolio.

May be taken for 3 hours of WAC requirement.May
be taken for certification in Secondary English Education.

Description: Professional
careers require you to present and prove your skills before you can
make significant advancements, and this is usually accomplished through
written documentation. Therefore, even if you are not a professional
writer, you will be a professional who writes. AProfessionals who can
write well are usually more impressive than those who cannot.

This course will
teach you how to write proper business letters, memos, email, and resumes.
Then we will advance into proper summarization, document design, and
instructional writing. Your final assignment will be a research project
requiring you to write a proposal, a short report, and a long assessment/recommendation
report.

Requirements: The
documents described above, several tests, and some small daily assignments.
Punctual submission of assignments is crucial; if you have trouble meeting
deadlines, this is not the course for you.

Required
for Certification in Secondary English Education. May be repeated for
credit as genre or topic varies. Students may enroll up to three semesters.
May be taken for 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description:
As a genre, fiction may be said to present pretense as reality, thereby
involving the reader in a temporary illusion. This course will consider
the cultural and ideological function of this process. We will raise
questions about what kinds of fictions arise from particular historical
and cultural circumstances and consider the relationship between text
and context. Some writers strive to close the gap between real and fictional
worlds, producing fictions that mirror reality as closely as possible;
others emphasize the constructed, textual nature of the worlds they
have invented. We will read an eclectic assortment of novels that define
and contest the boundaries of fiction, considering the relationship
between form and content, representation and reality.

Requirements:
Short paper, longer research-based paper, response papers, final exam.
Graduate students will be expected to do additional critical readings,
write a longer research paper, and take a leading role in class discussions.

Required
for Certification in Secondary English Education. May be repeated for
credit as genre or topic varies. Students may enroll up to three semesters.
May be taken for 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description:
This course will attempt to show how poetry means by looking
at the ways poets use language in “defamiliarized” ways. We will look
at poems from various historical and political contexts and try to examine
how what we think of as “poetry” is in continual flux. Rather than create
a taxonomy for poetry, then, we will instead be engaged in a more “evolutionary”
or “evolving” process of viewing the poetic act. What does, say, the
Anglo-Saxon poem “The Wanderer” have to do with a 20th-century
poem such as Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”? More importantly, how do
they influence and affect one another? Is it possible that the influence
works in both directions, that Lowell’s poem influences a poem from
the first millennium? And how finally do they affect us as readers?
In addition to this trans-historical training, students will also look
closely at a single contemporary collection of poems and situate that
work within the framework constructed throughout the semester constructing.

Texts: Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry; Mason and Nims, eds., Western
Wind; plus a course packet of poems, and the purchase of a single
volume of poetry during the course.

Requirements:
participation, quizzes, mid-term and final exam, memorization of twenty-five
lines of poetry, six critical responses (2 pages each), and a final
research-based paper (8-10 pages).

Description:
This course will focus on representative novels that have significantly
influenced the development of the American novel with some discussion
of precursor genres (spiritual and criminal biographies and autobiographies,
travel writing, captivity narratives, romances, etc.). This course
will also examine different theoretical positions accounting for the
nature and evolution of the genre and the changing relationship between
the novel and the reading public.

Description:
Since at least the early- to mid-1950s in the United States, there has
been one audience that has spent the most money on films, attended films
with the greatest frequency, and garnered the undivided attention and
adoration of Hollywood producers and studio heads alike: teenagers.
In this course, we will examine adolescents as filmgoers, deconstruct
the filmic texts sold to them, and attempt to theorize their special
position as cinematic consumers and, sometimes, producers.

Seeing
as the “teen film,” in fact, dates back to the early sound era, we will
begin the course with a brief history of Hollywood’s attention to teens
as subject matter and cinemagoers, which will be followed by an overview
of genre studies in film criticism, especially as it pertains to this
popular post-war genre. Finally, these historical and generic contexts
will provide the groundwork for theoretical analyses of several films,
preparing students for the kind of analysis expected in their final
research papers. Filmic texts might include many or all of the following:
Angels With Dirty Faces, Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without
a Cause, Girls Town, Splendor in the Grass, Easy Rider,
Harold and Maude, A Clockwork Orange, Cooley High, American Graffiti,
Halloween, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Breakfast Club, River’s
Edge, Heathers, Boyz N the Hood, Heavenly Creatures, and Donnie
Darko.

Fulfills
the Literary History Requirement in American Literature I. May be taken
for 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description:While it is often characterized as an era populated
by dour-faced Puritans and sermonic texts, Colonial and Early American
literature was instead an era of dynamic cultural encounters and transitions,
which radically altered Europe and the New World. Our reading will
reflect the diversity of literary works and cultural perspectives from
this 300-year period and will include exploration narratives by women
and men, Native American literature, and women novelists from the early
republic. Among the topics we will consider: 1) how early exploration
narratives shaped the European vision of the Americas and were used
to translate the New World to European audiences; 2) the transforming
experience of first encounters with the geographical landscape of the
Americas and with people from other cultures; 3) the construction of
the New World as a constantly evolving fictional text out of which early
explorers and colonists struggled to fashion new personal and social
identities; 4) the textual and interpretive challenge of reconstructing
early Native American oral narratives; 5) the evolution of gender roles
during the Colonial and New Republic eras; and 6) the role of language
and writing in the era of exploration and in the formation of the new
nation.

Texts: Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and
Restoration; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the
Life of Olaudah Equiano; Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple;
Ben Franklin, The Autobiography; Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar
Huntley; Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians;
Tabitha Tenny, Female Quixotism. Other shorter works (exploration
narratives, poems, and short stories) will be assigned from a course
reading packet, electronic (online) editions, or placed on reserve.

Requirements: For undergraduates, active participation in class discussions,
reading quizzes, 2 short response papers, midterm and final essay exams,
and a 8-10 page research paper (with proposal). For graduate students,
all of the requirements listed above as well as an annotated bibliography
(min. 10 sources), and a more extensive 12-15 page research paper.
WAC Requirement: This is a writing intensive course. Your response
papers and other assignments involve writing-to-learn activities in
which you will be using the writing exercise itself to come to terms
with the material we have read. ALL of these written assignments should
conform to the standards of college-level, academic writing. By successfully
completing this course, you can receive WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum)
credit toward graduation. The goals of WAC are to encourage students
to use writing as a way to learn, to show students how to write effectively
in their disciplines and to improve students' writing skills. All students
majoring in disciplines in the School of Arts and Sciences are required
to satisfy the WAC requirements for WAC to graduate: These requirements
include at least two 3000/4000 level W courses for a total of 6 hours
with at least 3 of these hours in the major. Additional WAC certification
is also available. See the current undergraduate catalog for details.

Description: The eighteenth century was a period of flux in Britain;
the rise of the middle class threatened to reshape established notions
of social identity, while definitions of gender and sexuality were arguably
both fluid and contested. The same diversity is reflected in literary
trends of the period, which ranged from formal poetic wit to the frank
bawdiness of restoration and eighteenth-century drama to the emergence
of a new, unwieldy, still-developing form, the early novel. This course
will trace the shifting ideologies of the eighteenth century through
representations of class, gender, and society in a variety of representative
texts, paying particular attention to the concept of “virtue,” which
is alternately rewarded, abandoned, celebrated, derided, questioned
and ultimately defined in these works.

Requirements:
Active participation, quizzes, oral presentations, two essays (one a
longer research-based paper), responses, final exam. Graduate students
will be expected to do additional critical readings, write a longer
research paper, and take a leading role in class discussions.

Description:“The House that Modernism Built” After "eminent Victorian"
Sir Leslie Stephen's death in 1904, Virginia, Vanessa, and Thoby Stephen
repaired to 46 Gordon square in Bloomsbury. In a 1921 address, Virginia
Woolf remembered this exodus from her childhood home at Hyde Park Gate
saying, "We were full of experiments and reforms. We were going
to do without table napkins, we were to have large supplies of Bromo
instead; we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner
instead of at nine o' clock. Everything was going to be new; everything
was going to be different; everything was on trial." In their quest
to "make it new," the Bloomsberries and other artists of the
early to mid-twentieth century put into play revolutionary artistic
principles and created art objects reflective of their own historicity.
Our course will focus on the artist-architects who built the Modernist
era. Up for discussion will be both "major" and "minor"
texts in multiple genres and the socio-economic and political positioning
found in them. We will also investigate the effects of World War One
on artists’ work, the creation and application of key aesthetic principles
across genre boundary lines, the advent of modern psychoanalytical theory,
and artistic renderings that focus on Britain’s practice of imperialism.

Description: This course, subtitled “Modern American Fiction
in Black and White,” will explore the myths, themes, and political controversies
that have shaped the development of modern American fiction, with a
particular eye towards the troubled status of racial identity in the
American imagination. As we survey such literary movements as Realism,
Modernism, and Post-modernism, we will pay attention to the way that
new literary forms and movements responded to dramatic social and historical
events and shifting cultural attitudes about race, particularly our
attitudes towards the categories of “whiteness” and “blackness.” We
will also consider the role of American fiction in shaping those attitudes.
The works we will read demonstrate a wide a range of perspectives and
narrative techniques, and each suggests new ways to imagine the status
of the individual, the boundaries of nationhood, and the meaning of
such categories as race, ethnicity, class, and gender in America. While
examining the works’ shared interests in history, identity, and human
agency, we will also bear in mind the unique nature of the individual
writers and their texts.

Requirements: Students are expected to complete the day’s
reading assignment in advance and come to class prepared to participate
in discussion. Students must maintain a passing quiz average, write
several short papers, a 1500-word essay, a 2500-word essay, and a final
exam.

May
be repeated for credit as topic varies. May be taken for 3 hours of
WAC requirement.

Description:
We will begin with fiction written soon after the Civil War that contributed
to the creation of a mythic interpretation of the antebellum South and
helped establish a Southern heroic narrative pattern that took many
forms. Whether they followed the career of the plantation beau or belle
or traced the adventures of the frontier or tall-tale hero, these narratives
left a standard and a legend that later Southern writers would respond
to in a variety of ways. Most of our effort will then be concentrated
on fiction of a later era when the need to “claw out” of desperate economic
and cultural circumstances and a response to modernist aesthetics sparked
conflict with the Southern heroic order reflected through both tragic
and comic modes. Though several other themes and aesthetic issues will
be explored, this response to the past will anchor our discussions.

Requirements:
Rigorous preparation for class and participation in discussions, two
short papers (4-5 pages), a midterm and a comprehensive final, one longer
research paper (10-12 pages). Graduate students will, in lieu of the
final exam, write a more substantial research paper grounded in an appropriate
critical context. They will also critique a draft of another graduate
student’s paper.

May
be repeated for credit as topic varies. Shakespeare may be taken for
up to six (6) hours, if topic varies, with department chair’s permission.
May be taken for 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description:
Who is your Jane Austen? A subversive writer whose biting satires exposed
the harsh social inequalities of her time? Or a conservative whose
celebration of England and especially its gentry worked to suppress
questioning of a society based on imperialism abroad and hierarchies
of class and gender at home? A spinster lady, referred to condescendingly
but also lovingly as "Aunt Jane" by critics well into the
twentieth century? Or a novelist whose unparalleled technical mastery
made her one of the first women to force entry into the British literary
canon? A deeply philosophical thinker whose work offers a sustained
meditation on the nature of modern love? Or an entertainer who brought
to perfection the art of dazzling her readers with pretty surfaces?

This
course will offer an opportunity to compare and explore our reading
experiences of a set of texts that have inspired widely varied reactions
in the nearly two centuries since Austen began publishing. We will
supplement our exploration with critical readings including Sir Walter
Scott's early acknowledgements, David Simpson's mid-nineteenth-century
depiction of Austen as an undercover Platonist, and the essay from Edward
Said's Culture and Imperialism that started a revolution in Austen
criticism. We will also take time for a lighter consideration of Austen's
recent popularity, especially among filmmakers.

Texts:
Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park,
Emma, Lady Susan, all in Oxford World Classics paperback
editions, and selections from Austen's juvenilia on electronic reserve.
We will also view the controversial 1999 film version of Mansfield
Park. Secondary material will be made available on electronic reserve.

May
be repeated for credit as topic varies. Shakespeare may be taken for
up to six hours, if topic varies, with department chair’s permission.
May be taken for 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description:
Contemporary approaches to Elizabeth Bishop often view her poetry on
a threshold between modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. This course
will begin with a study of the dominant philosophical and artistic assumptions
of “the modern” and “the postmodern,” and attempt to situate Bishop’s
work on the shifting borders of two traditions and historical contexts.
In a primarily discussion-based format, the class will inspect Bishop’s
subtle critiques of patriarchal violence and the oppression of women,
her interest in the semiotics of the body as a map of ideological inscriptions,
and her explorations of the intersections between race and gender. We
will also explore various intertextual aspects of her work—her revisions,
for example, of Marianne Moore and Emily Dickinson, and her work’s ambivalent
relationship to the confessional movement and the poetry of figures
such as Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. The course will survey Bishop’s
collected poems through the lenses of present-day literary theories
(including deconstruction, new historicism, race theory, post-feminism,
gender studies, and queer theory), and will also delve into Bishop’s
prose and letters.

Requirements:
Students will read and summarize at least five scholarly essays on Bishop’s
writing, compose two short analyses of at least five pages in length,
and write a final researched study of at least ten pages. (The requirements
for graduate-level credit will reflect an appropriate degree of additional
rigor.)

Prerequisite:
ENGL 3200. May be repeated for credit as topic varies. May be taken
for 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description:
This class will look at the short story from a writerly perspective,
and require students to complete and workshop at least two longer stories
(10-20 pages) along with a number of weekly responses. As a craft text,
we will be using John Gardener’s The Art of Fiction. We will
begin the class by reading such masters of the genre as Updike and O’Connor,
then turn our attention to more recent collections, such as Denis Johnson’s
Jesus’ Son and Dana Johnson’s Break Any Woman Down. We
will be reading a number of the excellent stories from the recent anthology
The Contemporary American Short Story. You will develop your
skills as active readers and writers, with attention not only to craft
and form, but to thematic content and relevance. I expect active engagement
with and respect for the work of fellow students, and some familiarity
with fiction writing. This is primarily a workshop class, but active
reading produces good writing, thus the longer reading list.

Required
for certification in Secondary English Education. Cross-listed with
SEED 4295. May be taken for 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description:
In this course, we will explore the contemporary experience of young-adults
as expressed through fiction and graphic novels. Drawing on reader-response
theory and social-constructivist issues in childhood studies, we will
examine how these seemingly simple texts written for middle and high-school
age students register literary, dialogic, visual, and social complexities.
In context of this cultural and theoretical framework, we will also
bear in mind the practical element of this course, designed to assist
in the preparation of prospective teachers of English at the high-school
level by exploring literacy instruction using young adult literature
in its own right and as a bridge to classic literature. (Cross-listed
with SEED 4295.)

Description: In this course, we will explore the structure
or grammar of the English language and work toward understanding the
principles or rules that make it work. This course is primarily designed
for English majors who seek to improve the grammatical proficiency of
their writing and for future teachers at the secondary and college level.
However, this course also has applications for students entering business
and industry, science and medical fields, law and politics, media and
public relations, or anyone who recognizes the essential human value
of language and who understands how the ability to use language contributes
to personal and professional success in life. After all, when you are
talking to friends, asking someone out on a date, debating sports or
politics, buying clothes at the mall, or writing a paper, you are using
the structures and principles of English grammar, even when your sentences
are not grammatical! However, knowing a language and knowing
about the language are different kinds of knowledge. Even the ability
to speak grammatically correct sentences in no way guarantees that a
speaker knows enough about English to explain what makes those sentences
grammatical. This course is designed to help you achieve that knowledge.
We will refer frequently to Standard English, and, certainly, one of
the benefits of this course is that it will help you refine your written
and verbal language skills. However, this is not simply a course about
grammatical correctness; instead, this course is designed to help you
understand how the English language functions, what structures and rules
are behind the sentence constructions that you and others create every
day. To accomplish this task, we will learn some basic linguistic and
grammatical concepts, and we will learn how to analyze (and diagram)
different sentence constructions. We will also learn how elements of
the language (verbs, nouns, sentence structure, pronouns, etc.) emerged
and changed over time to create the language we use today.

Requirements: For undergraduates, active participation, four exams
(a midterm and final included in this number), and in-class and homework
assignments. For graduate students, all of the items above, as well
as an annotated bibliography and a research essay on grammar and pedagogy.

Prerequisite:
ENGL 2300. May be repeated for credit as topic varies. May be taken
for 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description:
Arguably one of the most influential critics of the second half of the
twentieth century, Northrop Frye, asserted in one of his most accessible
books, The Educated Imagination, that one does not have a choice in
having an imagination. You have one whether you like it or not; your
consciousness, your politics, your love-life is affected by that imagination.
You do however have a choice to educate your imagination by studying
literature and the arts. I would make a claim about critical theory.
You don’t have a choice about employing and being employed by your critical
faculties, but you can understanding something of how it works, how
it has worked in the past, how it can be tricked, and what it can deliver
and a little of what it cannot. In this course, we will spend for the
first several weeks reading and attempting to understand some of the
standard texts of critical theory or aesthetics, theorists such as Plato,
Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Kant,
Hegel, Nietzsche. Later we will look at modern criticism through the
lens of a particular problem or question: the subject, the author, the
text, the referent, the body, the subaltern, or the differend.

Required
for all English majors. Cannot be taken until ENGL 1101, 1102 and core
area F have been completed with a minimum passing grade of C. A minimum
of 18 hours of upper-level English courses must also have been completed.
Requires permission of the department chair. Not offered during the
summer session. May be taken for 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description:
Reading is a cultural practice. As critic Gabrielle Schwab has argued,
one function of this practice is to provide readers with "an experience
of otherness." On one level, literature helps readers accept and
engage cultural differences that otherwise might seem too strange to
be meaningful to them. On another level, literary language "defamiliarizes"
their own culture, and helps them notice internal differences they might
otherwise gloss over. All literature can thus be understood as a kind
of fictional or imaginary ethnography, and reading as a place of cultural
contact.

Senior
seminars offer students an opportunity to reflect on and express their
experiences as English majors as they develop individual projects and
work collaboratively on an anthology. This seminar will invite students
to discuss their projects in the framework of a theory of cultural contact,
which Gregory Bateson defined as including not only (1) contacts between
different national or ethnic cultures, but also (2) contact between
significant groups within a culture, and (3) the process by which young
people are initiated into their own culture. This framework is deliberately
broad, so that students will have the widest possible choice of topics
for their projects.

Texts:
Shakespeare, The Tempest; Ngugi, A Grain of Wheat; as
well as a set of critical texts on electronic reserve at the library.

Requirements:
Active class participation, two short papers, oral presentation, and
research project (including proposal, required drafts, editing workshops
and formal peer editing responses, a formal annotated bibliography,
and a final documented research paper of 15-16 pages).

Required
for all English majors. Cannot be taken until ENGL 1101, 1102 and core
area F have been completed with a minimum passing grade of C. A minimum
of 18 hours of upper-level English courses must also have been completed.
Requires permission of the department chair. Not offered during the
summer session. May be taken for 3 hours of WAC requirement.

Description:
This
capstone course, a culmination of study in the English major, allows
students to examine a critical/theoretical issue within the discipline
and use their coursework and literary interests to choose a research
project which will become part of a published anthology of essays from
the class. This semester, we will explore the ways in which
trickster figures (representing madness, witchcraft, or the supernatural)
function in literary texts. In virtually all cultures, tricksters (ubiquitous
shape-shifters who dwell on borders, at crossroads, and between worlds)
are both folk heroes and wanderers on the edges of the community, at
once marginal and central to the culture. Tricksters challenge the status
quo and disrupt perceived boundaries, which is why Smith argues for
their particular functions in contemporary ethnic American writers.
Using Smith’s Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in Ethnic American
Literature, we will focus on the central functions of these characters
in the construction of identity and culture. We will apply these arguments
to race and gender in Morrison’s Sula and Maxine Hong Kingston’s
The Woman
Warrior andextend the argument in terms of how imagination and social rebellion lead to madness (or
the construction of madness) in Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
and the film Girl Interrupted. Finally, we may ponder how the narrative forms themselves act as trickster
narratives for readers. Student projects may be on any literary/filmic
text (British or American) in which ghosts, witches, or madwomen/madmen
figure in the construction of identity within a given culture.

Texts:
Smith, Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in Ethnic American Literature,
Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts,
Morrison, Sula, Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, and film
Girl Interrupted

Requirements:
Class discussion, individual and group oral reports, two response essays,
substantive research project, including prospectus, abstract, and annotated
bibliography.

Description: When Ireland’s drive for political independence from Britain
stalled at the end of the 19th century, the arts, particularly
the theater, became a potent space for the exploration of an autonomous
cultural identity. Irish audiences, tired of the melodramatic vision
of themselves popularized on Victorian London’s stages, became hungry
for positive self-images and came to see the Abbey Theater in Dublin
as an important space in which to define themselves anew. At times,
Ireland’s newly formed national theater offered up exactly that, but
on more than one occasion, the artistic goals of the Abbey’s directors,
who wished to create a theatrical movement that would be valued as an
aesthetic and intellectual enterprise rather than as a propagandistic
tool, brought the theater into conflict--sometimes violent, chair-throwing
conflict--with its audience. The public nature of the stage, the close
proximity between the recipients of the artistic image and those involved
in its creation, made it a powerful, but also a potentially volatile,
means of constructing a national self.

Benedict Anderson defines nationalism as the drive to create an “imagined
community,” and this course will examine the role of performance in
this process in 20th-century Ireland. Exploring theatrical
uses of myth, local dialect and historical events, the course will address
how these ideas have evolved in response to audiences’ expectations
of dramatic genre and performance style and to the various pressures
exerted by the changing currents of modern Irish history – from the
struggle for independence to the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern
Ireland and the more recent Europe-centered focus of the Irish Republic.

Texts: Modern Irish Drama (including plays by W.B. Yeats, George
Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, Brendan Behan and Brian Friel)
and individual plays by Marina Carr (Portia Coughlan), Seamus
Heaney (The Cure at Troy), Sebastian Barry (Prayers of Sherkin),
Frank McGuinness (Observe the Sons of Ulster) and John B. Keane
(The Field); critical essays will provide background on Irish
theater history as well as theoretical approaches to the construction
of nationalism, postcolonial identity and performativity.

Requirements: Two short response essays, one 15-minute oral presentation,
15-20 page research paper preceded by a proposal, active participation
in discussion.

ENGL
6385-01: Seminar in Special Topics, Prof. Alison Umminger
American Literature at Mid-Century: Race and Sexuality at a Crossroads
M 5:30PM-8:00PM, TLC 1204

Requires
permission of the director of graduate studies.

Description:
This seminar will look at one of the more nebulous times in American
literary history, the 1940s and 1950s, a time when race and gender roles
underwent revolutionary transformations in America and in American literature.
These texts point to rapidly changing ideas about race, gender, and
sexuality. While we will also look at the movement from modern to postmodern
in the literary (and cultural) landscape, and be attentive to the “beats,”
we will search for other ways to define this transitional moment in
American literary history.

Requirements:
Weekly short response papers; oral report on a theoretical or critical
text; individual research project including prospectus, annotated bibliography,
final research paper, and oral presentation.

Required
for Creative Writing Minor. Prerequisites: ENGL 1101 and 1102. May
count for credit in Core Area C.

Description:
The object of this course is to familiarize you with three distinctive
ways in which artists from a range of cultural and historical backgrounds
make sense (and art) of the world. Beginning with a trans-media study
of the contrary artistic concepts of “order” and “chaos,” the class
will then look at three methods by which artists marry or synthesize
those contraries. Methods include “the aesthetic” (privileging the artistic
medium itself), “the pragmatic” (privileging the purpose behind the
artistic expression), and “the expressive” (privileging the artist in
the act of creating). Using Csikszentmihalyi’s critical study of the
creative mind and processes in tandem with two first-person accounts
by Hugo and Shahn, students will work towards constructing a critical
discourse regarding the nature of the creative process and test course
theories on their own artistic creations.

Texts:
Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery
and Invention; Hugo, The Triggering Town; Shahn, The Shape
of Content; plus an artist’s biography of your choosing.

Requirements:
Quizzes, daily readings and exercises, attendance at five cultural events,
final creative project with critical preface, midterm, and final.

Prerequisites:
ENGL 1101 and 1102. May count for credit in Core Area C

Description:
Photography and Short Stories will study the dialogic relationship
between photographic images and short stories. Fraternal twins separated
at birth, the modern short story and the photographic image have flourished,
one form shadowing the other, since their origins in the mid-nineteenth
century. This course will analyze the synergistic effect created by
photographic images and short fiction when they are scrutinized through
the dual lenses of perspective and point of view. Both disciplines present
sketches, slices of perspective that concentrate on a single or unique
effect. In their uses and manipulations of point of view, both disciplines
appear infinitely malleable and wildly flexible as artists continually
craft and redefine the ways in which a story or an image can be “told.”
Our study of the synergy between short fiction and image will begin
with Eudora Welty, an artist who serves as the literal and physical
embodiment of the interpenetration of these two disciplines. As a young
woman, Welty worked for the Works Progress Administration in a job that
allowed her access to places and people throughout her home state. Before
she wrote, Welty photographed—recorded on film her sojourn through Mississippi’s
eighty-two counties. Closely reading a Welty short story and several
of her images will enable students to formulate a set of terms and concepts
that are shared by both disciplines. Welty’s fiction and images, along
with these specific terms and concepts descriptive of both disciplines,
provide the springboard to all that follows—dozens of photographic
images, thirteen stories, and Susan Sontag’s On Photography and
Regarding the Pain of Others..

Texts:
Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others;
course packet of short stories, an online portfolio of photographic
images, and selected essays on photography.

Requirements:
Students will write three essays on topics derived from the themes and
concepts in the texts. These essays will be approximately 1000 words
and will require secondary sources. Weekly informal response writing
intended to generate ideas and concepts explored in greater depth and
detail in the essays will be assigned. This writing is designed as write
to learn exercises and offers students a free space in which to begin
exploring the texts. Students will select an essay, article, photographer,
or series of images and present a report on it to the class. A midterm
and a final exam.

Prerequisites:
ENGL 1101 and 1102. May count for credit in Core Area C

Description:Through the analysis of representations in literature, music, film
and television, and the visual arts, this course examines the range
of identities (and associated gender ideologies) connected with American
women from the early twentieth century to present day. Our studies
will investigate historical figures such as “the New Woman,” “the suffragette,”
and “the flapper,” as well as more contemporary ones, including Xena
Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.